But a covert glance aside brought prompt reassurance; after all, the gods were not unkind; the policeman was just then busy on the far side of the avenue, hectoring humility into the heart of an unhappy taxicab operator who had, presumably, violated some minor municipal ordinance.
Inconsistently enough--so strong is the habit of a law-abiding mind--the sight of that broad, belted, self-sufficient back, symbolic of the power and sanity of the law, affected Sally with a mad impulse to turn, hail the officer, and inform him of the conditions she had just quitted. And she actually swerved aside, as if to cross the avenue, before she realised how difficult it would be to invoke the law without implicating herself most damningly.
Recognition of that truth was like receiving a dash of ice-water in her face; she gasped, cringed, and scurried on up Park Avenue as if hoping to outdistance thought. A forlorn hope, that: refreshed from its long rest (for since the storm she had been little better than the puppet of emotions, appetites, and inarticulate impulses) her mind had resumed its normal functioning.
Inexorably it analysed her plight and proved that what she had conceived in an hour of discontent and executed on the spur of an envious instant could nevermore be undone. What had been planned to be mere temporary appropriation of an outfit of clothing--"to be returned in good order, reasonable wear and tear excepted"--was one thing; safe-breaking, with the theft of Heaven only knew what treasure, was quite another. As to that, had she not been guilty of active complicity in the greater crime? How could she be sure (come to think of it) that the stout man had not been the lawful caretaker rather than a rival housebreaker?
She had indeed commenced adventures with a vengeance!
The police were bound to learn of the affair all too soon; her part in it was as certain to become known; too late she was reminded that the name "Manvers" indelibly identified every garment abandoned in the bath-room. Before morning certainly, before midnight probably, Sarah Manvers would be the quarry of a clamorous hue-and-cry.
Appalled, she hurried on aimlessly, now and again breaking into desperate little jog-trots, with many a furtive glance over shoulder, with as many questing roundabout for refuge or resource.
But the city of that night wore a visage new and strange to her, and terrifying. The very quietness of those few residential blocks, marooned amid ever-rising tides of trade, had an ominous accent. All the houses seemed to have drawn together, cheek by jowl, in secret conference on her case, sloughing their disdainful daytime pose and following her fugitive, guilty figure with open amusement and contempt. Some (she thought) leered horribly at her, others scowled, others again assumed a scornful cast; one and all pretended to a hideous intelligence, as though they knew and, if they would, could say what and why she fled.
It was as if the storm had been a supernatural visitation upon the city, robbing it of every intimate, homely aspect, leaving it inhumanly distorted in an obsession of abominable enchantment.
With the start of one suddenly delivered from dream-haunted sleep, she found herself arrived at Forty-Second Street, and safe; none pursued her, nothing in her manner proclaimed the new-fledged malefactor; she need only observe ordinary circumspection to escape notice altogether. And for several moments she remained at a complete standstill there on the corner, blocking the fairway of foot traffic and blindly surveying the splendid facade of Grand Central Station, spellbound in wonder at the amazing discovery that Providence did not always visit incontinent retribution upon the heads of sinners--since it appeared that she who had sinned was to escape scot-free.
With this she was conscious of a flooding spirit of exultant impenitence; the deadly monotony of her days was done with once and for all. It mattered little that--since it were suicidal to return to the studio, the first place the police would search for her--she was homeless, friendless, penniless; it mattered little that she was hungry (now that she remembered it) and had not even a change of clothing for the morrow; these things would somehow be arranged--whether by luck or by virtue of her wit--they must!
All that really mattered was that the commonplace was banished from her ways, that she was alive, foot-loose and fancy-free, finally and definitely committed to the career of an adventuress.
Paradoxically, she was appalled by contemplation of her amazing callousness; outlawed, declassée, she was indifferent to her degradation, and alive only to the joy of freedom from the bondage of any certain social status.
Now as she lingered on the corner, people were passing her continually on their way over to the terminal; and one of these presently caught her attention--a man who, carrying a small oxford hand-bag, came up hastily from behind, started to cross the street, drew back barely in time to escape annihilation at the wheels of a flying squadron of taxicabs, and so for a moment waited, in impatient preoccupation with his own concerns, only a foot or two in advance but wholly heedless of the girl.
Sally caught her breath sharply, and her wits seemed to knit together with a sort of mental click; the man was Blue Serge, identified unmistakably to her eyes by the poise of his blue-clad person--the same Blue Serge who owed his life to Sally Manvers!
In another instant the way cleared and the man moved smartly on again, with every indication of one spurred on by an urgent errand--but went no more alone. Now a pertinacious shadow dogged him to the farther sidewalk, into the yawning vestibule of the railway station, on (at a trot) through its stupendous lobbies, even to the platform gates that were rudely slammed in his face by implacable destiny in the guise and livery of a gateman.
At this, pausing a little to one side, Sally watched Blue Serge accost the guardian, argue, protest, exhibit tickets, and finally endeavour to bribe a way past the barrier. But the train was already pulling out; with a shake of his stubborn head the uniformed official moved on; and ruminating on a power of pent profanity, Blue Serge turned and strode back into the waiting-room, passing so near to Sally that their elbows almost touched without his rousing to the least recognition of her existence.
But that in itself was nothing to dismay or check the girl in her purpose, and when Blue Serge a minute later addressed himself to the Pullman bureau she was still his shadow--an all but open eavesdropper upon his communications with the authority of the brass-barred wicket.
"I've just missed the eleven ten for Boston," she heard him explain as he displayed tickets on the marble ledge, "and, of course, I'm out my berth reservation. Can you give me a lower on the midnight express?"
"No," Authority averred with becoming sententiousness.
"An upper, then?"
"Nothing left an the midnight."
"Not even a stateroom?"
"I told you nothing doing."
"Well, then, perhaps you can fix me up for the Owl train?"
"Wait a minute."
A pause ensued while Authority consulted his records; not a long pause, but one long enough to permit a wild, mad inspiration to flash like lightning athwart the clouded horizon of Sally's doubt and perplexity. Surely it were strangely inconsistent with her role of adventuress to permit this man to escape, now that destiny had delivered him into her unscrupulous hands!
"Owl train? De luxe room or ordinary stateroom--all I got left."
"Good enough. I'll take--"
If Blue Serge failed promptly to nominate his choice, it was only because Miss Manvers chose that juncture to furnish him--and incidentally herself, when she had time to think things over--with what was unquestionably for both of them the most staggering surprise of that most surprising night.
Peremptorily plucking a blue-serge sleeve with the brazenest impudence imaginable, she advised her victim:
"Take both, if you please!"
Had she schemed deliberately to strike him dumb in consternation, her success must have afforded Sally intense satisfaction. Since she hadn't, her personal consternation was momentarily so overpowering as to numb her sense of appreciation. So that for the period of a long minute neither of them moved nor spoke; but remained each with a blank countenance reflecting a witless mind, hypnotised by the stupefaction of the other.
Then, perhaps a shade the quicker to recover, Sally fancied that her victim's jaw had slackened a bit and his colour faded perceptibly; and with this encouragement she became herself again, collected, aggressive, confronting him undismayed before recognition dawned upon Blue Serge, and, with it, some amused appreciation of her effrontery. Even so, his first essay at response was nothing more formidable than a stammered "I beg your pardon?"
She explained with absolute composure: "I said, take both rooms, please. I'm going to Boston, too."
"Oh!" he replied stupidly.
She nodded with determination and glanced significantly aside, with a little toss of her head, toward the middle of the lobby.
"There's a Central Office man over there," she observed obliquely, dissembling considerable uncertainty as to what a Central Office man really was, and why.
"There is!"
"If you go to Boston, I go," she persisted stolidly. His countenance darkened transiently with distrust or temper. Then of a sudden the man was shaken by a spasm of some strange sort--the corners of his mouth twitched, his eyes twinkled, he lifted a quizzical eyebrow, his lips parted.
But whatever retort he may have contemplated was checked by the accents of Authority and the tapping of an imperative pencil on the window-ledge.
"Say, I'm busy. Which are you going to take now, de luxe room or--"
"Both!" With the dexterity of a stage conjurer Blue Serge whipped a bill from his pocket and thrust it beneath the wicket, not for an instant detaching his gaze from Sally. "And quick," said he; "I'm in a hurry!"
Grunting resentfully, Authority proceeded to issue the reservations, thus affording Sally, constrained to return without a tremor the steadfast regard of her burglar, time to appreciate the lengths to which bravado had committed her. And though she stood her ground without flinching, her cheeks had taken on a hue of bright crimson before Blue Serge, without troubling to verify them, seized tickets and change and turned squarely to her.
"Now that's settled," he inquired amiably, "what next?"
The better to cover her lack of a ready answer, she made believe to consult the mellow orb of the four-faced clock that crowns the bureau of information.
"The Owl train leaves when?" she asked with a finely speculative air.
"One o'clock."
"Then we've got over an hour and a half to wait!"
"How about a bite of supper? The station restaurant is just down-stairs--"
"Thank you," she agreed with a severe little nod.
Lugging his bag, he led the way with the air of one receiving rather than conferring a favour.
"Curious how things fall out," he observed cheerfully; "isn't it?"
"Yes--"
"I mean, your popping up like this just when I was thinking of you. Coincidence, you know."
"Coincidences," Sally informed him consciously, "are caviar only to book critics. There's nothing more common in real life."
He suffered this instruction with a mildly anguished smile.
"That's true, I presume, if one knows anything about real life. I don't go in for realistic novels you see, so can't say. But you're right one way: it isn't anything extraordinary, come to consider it, that you and I, both headed for Boston, should run into each other here. By the way," he added with a casual air, "speaking of coincidences, it sort of triple-plated this one to have your friend from Central Office hanging round so handy, didn't it? If he's in sight, why not be a sport and tip me off?"
"I don't see the necessity," Sally returned, biting her lip--"yet."
"Not from your point of view, perhaps--from mine, yes. Forewarned is fortunate, you know."
"I dare say."
"You won't put me wise?"
"Certainly not."
"Well, of course, one can guess why."
"Can one?"
"Why, forgive me for calling your bluff, it wouldn't be safe, would it? Of course, I'm a sure-enough bad man--and all that. But you must be a bird of my feather, or you wouldn't flock together so spontaneously."
Sally opened her eyes wide and adopted a wondering drawl known to have been of great service to Miss Lucy Spode: "Why, whatever do you mean?"
"Good!" Blue Serge applauded. "Now I know where I stand. That baby stare is the high sign of our fraternity--of blackbirds. Only the guilty ever succeed in looking as transparently innocent. Too bad you didn't think of that in time."
"I don't follow you," she said truthfully, beginning to feel that she wasn't figuring to great advantage in this passage of repartee.
"I mean, your give-away is calculated to cramp your style; now you can't very well cramp mine, threatening to squeal."
"Oh, can't I?"
"No. I know you won't go through with it; not, that is, unless you're willing to face Sing Sing yourself. For that matter, I don't see how you're going to make Boston at all to-night, after that break, unless you go on your own; I don't believe I'm scared enough to stand for being shaken down for your transportation."
He was gaining the whip-hand much too easily. She averted her face to mask a growing trepidation and muttered sullenly: "What makes you think I'm afraid--?"
"Oh, come!" he chuckled. "I know you hadn't any lawful business in that house, don't I?"
"How do you know it?"
"Because if you had, I would now be going peaceful, with the kind policeman instead of being a willing victim of a very pleasant form of blackmail."
Burning with indignation and shivering a bit with fear of the man, she stopped short, midway down the ramp to the "lower level," and momentarily contemplated throwing herself upon his mercy and crawling out of it all with whatever grace she might; but his ironic and skeptical smile provoked her beyond discretion.
"Oh, very well!" she said ominously, turning, "if that's the way you feel about it, we may as well have this thing out here and now."
And she made as if to go back the way she had come; but his hand fell upon her arm with a touch at once light and imperative.
"Steady!" he counselled quietly. "This is no place for either bickering or barefaced confidences. Besides, you mustn't take things so much to heart. I was only making fun, and you deserved as much for your cheek, you know. Otherwise, there's no harm done. If you hanker to go to Boston, go you shall, and no thanks to me. Even if I do pay the bill, I owe you a heap more than I'll ever be able to repay, chances are. So take it easy; and I say, do brace up and make a bluff, at least, of being on speaking terms. I'm not a bad sort, but I'm going to stick to you like grim death to a sick nigger's bedside until we know each other better. That's flat, and you may as well resign yourself to it. And here we are."
Unwillingly, almost unaware, she had permitted herself to be drawn through the labyrinth of ramps to the very threshold of the restaurant, where, before she could devise any effectual means of reasserting herself, a bland head waiter took them in tow and, at Blue Serge's direction, allotted them a table well over to one side of the room, out of earshot of their nearest neighbours.
Temporarily too fagged and flustered to react either to the danger or to the novelty of this experience, or even to think to any good purpose, Sally dropped mechanically into the chair held for her, wondering as much at herself for accepting the situation as at the masterful creature opposite, earnestly but amiably conferring with the head waiter over the bill of fare.
Surely a strange sort of criminal, she thought, with his humour and ready address, his sudden shifts from slang of the street to phrases chosen with a discriminating taste in English, his cool indifference to her threatening attitude, and his paradoxical pose of warm--it seemed--personal interest in and consideration for a complete and, to say the least, very questionable stranger.
She even went so far as to admit that she might find him very likable, if only it were not for that affected little moustache and that semi-occasional trick he practised of looking down his nose when he talked.
On the other hand, one assumed, all criminals must seem strange types to the amateur observer. Come to think of it, she had no standard to measure this man by, and knew no law that prescribed for his kind either dress clothing with an inverness and a mask of polished imperturbability, or else a pea-jacket, a pug-nose, a cauliflower ear, with bow legs and a rolling gait. …
"There, I fancy that will do. But hurry it along, please."
"Very good, sir--immediately."
The head waiter ambled off, and Blue Serge faced Sally with an odd, illegible smile.
"At last!" he hissed in the approved manner of melodrama, "we are alone!"
She wasn't able to rise to his irresponsible humour. Thus far her audacity seemed to have earned her nothing but his derision. He was not in the least afraid of her--and he was a desperate criminal. Then what was she in his esteem?
Such thoughts drove home a fresh painful realisation of her ambiguous personal status. It began to seem that she had been perhaps a little hasty in assuming she was to be spared punishment for her sin, however venial that might in charity be reckoned. Chance had, indeed, offered what was apparently a broad and easy avenue of escape; but her own voluntary folly has chosen the wrong turning.
Her hands were twisted tight together in her lap as she demanded with tense directness:
"What have you done with them?"
He lifted the ironic eyebrow. " Them? "
"The jewels. I saw you steal them--watched you from the dining-room, through the folding doors--"
"The deuce you did!"
"I saw you break open the desk--and everything."
"Well," he admitted fairly, "I'm jiggered!"
"What have you done with them?"
"Oh, the jewels?" he said with curious intonation. "Ah--yes, to be sure; the jewels, of course. You're anxious to know what I've done with them?"
"Oh, no," she countered irritably; "I only ask out of politeness."
"Thoughtful of you!" he laughed. "Why, they're outside, of course--in my bag."
"Outside?"
"Didn't you notice? I checked it with my hat, rather than have a row. I ought to be ashamed of myself, I know, but I'm a moral coward before a coat-room attendant. I remember keeping tabs one summer, and--will you believe me?--a common, ordinary, every-day three-dollar straw lid set me back twenty-two dollars and thirty cents in tips. But I hope I'm not boring you."
"Oh, how can you?" she protested, lips tremulous with indignation.
"Don't flatter; I bore even myself at times."
"I don't mean that, and you know I don't. How can you sit there joking when you--when you've just--"
"Come off the job?" he caught her up as she faltered. "But why not? I feel anything but sad about it. It was a good job--wasn't it?--a clean haul, a clear getaway. Thanks, of course, to you."
She responded, not without some difficulty: "Please! I wouldn't have dared if he hadn't tried to get at that sword."
"Just like him, too!" Blue Serge observed with a flash of indignation: "his kind, I mean--less burglars than bunglers, with no professional pride, no decent instincts, no human consideration. They never stop to think it's tough enough for a householder to come home to a cracked crib without finding a total stranger to boot--a man he's never even seen before, like as not--ah--weltering on the premises--"
"Oh, do be serious!"
"Must I? If you wish."
The man composed his features to a mask of whimsical attention.
"What--what did you do with him?" the girl stammered after a pause during which consciousness of her disadvantage became only more acute.
"Our active little friend, the yegg? Why, I didn't do anything with him."
"You didn't leave him there'?"
"Oh, no; he went away, considerately enough--up-stairs and out through the scuttle--the way he broke in, you know. Surprisingly spry on his feet for a man of his weight and age--had all I could do to keep up. He did stop once, true, as if he'd forgotten something, but the sword ran into him--I happened thoughtlessly to be carrying it--only a quarter of an inch or so--and he changed his mind, and by the time I got my head through the scuttle he was gone--vanished utterly from human ken!"
"He had broken the scuttle open, you say?"
"Pried it up with a jimmy."
"And you left it so? He'll go back."
"No, he won't. I found hammer and nails and made all fast before I left."
"But," she demanded, wide-eyed with wonder, "why did you take that trouble?"
"My silly conceit, I presume. I couldn't bear the thought of having that roughneck return and muss up one of my neatest jobs."
"I don't understand you at all," she murmured, utterly confounded.
"Nor I you, if it matters. Still, I'm sure you won't keep me much longer in suspense, considering how open-faced I've been. But here's that animal of a waiter again."
She was willingly silent, though she exerted herself to seem at ease with indifferent success. The voice of her companion was like a distant, hollow echo in her hearing; her wits were all awhirl, her nerves as taut and vibrant as banjo-strings; before her vision the face of Blue Serge swam, a flesh-tinted moon now and again traversed by a flash of white when he smiled.
"Come!" the man rallied her sharply, if in an undertone, "this will never do. You're as white as a sheet, trembling and staring as if I were a leper--or a relation by marriage or--something repulsive!"
She sat forward mechanically and mustered an uncertain smile. "Forgive me. I'm a little overwrought--the heat and--everything."
"Not another word, then, till you've finished. I'll do the talking, if it's all the same to you. But you needn't answer--needn't listen, for that matter. I've no pride in my conversational powers, and you mustn't risk losing your appetite."
He seemed to find it easy enough to make talk; but Sally spared him little attention, being at first exclusively preoccupied with the demands of her hunger, and later--as the meal progressed, renewing her physical strength and turning the ebbing tide of her spirits--thoroughly engaged with the problem of how to extricate herself from this embarrassing association or, if extrication proved impossible, how to turn it to her own advantage. For if the affair went on this way--his way--she were a sorry adventuress indeed.
Small cups of black coffee stood before them, steaming, when a question roused her, and she shook herself together and faced her burglar across the cloth, once more full mistress of her faculties.
"You're feeling better'?"
"Very much," she smiled, "and thank you!"
"Don't make me uncomfortable; remember, this is all your fault.
"That I'm here, alive and whole, able to enjoy a most unique situation. Who are you?"
But she wasn't to be caught by any such simple stratagem as a question plumped suddenly at her with all the weight of a rightful demand; she smiled again and shook her head.
"Shan't tell."
"But if I insist?"
"Why don't you, then?"
"Meaning insistence won't get me anything?"
Sensitive to the hint of a hidden trump, she stiffened slightly.
"I haven't asked you to commit yourself. I've got a right to my own privacy."
There fell a small pause. Lounging, an elbow on the table, a cigarette fuming idly between his fingers, the man favoured her with a steady look of speculation whose challenge was modified only by the inextinguishable humour smouldering in his eyes--a look that Sally met squarely, dissembling her excitement. For with all her fears and perplexity she could never quite forget that, whatever its sequel, this was verily an adventure after her own heart, that she was looking her best in a wonderful frock and pitting her wits against those of an engaging rogue, that she who had twelve hours ago thought herself better dead was now living intensely an hour of vital emergency.
"But," the man said suddenly, and yet deliberately, "surely you won't dispute my right to know who makes free with my own home?"
Her bravado was extinguished as suddenly as a candle-flame in a gust of wind.
"Your home?" she parroted witlessly.
"Mine, yes. If you can forgive me." He fumbled for his card-case. "It has been amusing to play the part you assigned me of amateur cracksman, but really, I'm afraid, it can't be done without a better make-up."
He produced and placed before her on the cloth a small white card; and as soon as its neat black script ceased to writhe and run together beneath her gaze she comprehended the name of Mr. Walter Arden Savage, with a residence address identical with that of the house wherein her great adventure had begun.
"You!" she breathed aghast, "you're not really Mr. Savage?"
He smiled indulgently. "I rather think I am."
"But--"
Sally's voice failed her entirely, and he laughed a tolerant little laugh as he bent forward to explain.
"I don't wonder you are surprised--or at your mistake. The fact is, the circumstances are peculiar. It's my sister's fault, really; she's such a flighty little thing--unpardonably careless. I must have warned her a hundred times, if once, never to leave valuables in that silly old tin safe. But she won't listen to reason--never would. And it's her house--her safe. I've got no right to install a better one. And that is why we're here."
He smiled thoughtfully down his nose. "It's really a chapter of accidents to which I'm indebted for this charming adventure," he pursued with a suavely personal nod, "beginning with the blow-out of the taxicab tire that made us five minutes late for this evening's boat. We were bound up the Sound, you understand, to spend a fortnight with a maternal aunt. And our luggage is well on its way there now. So when we missed the boat there was nothing for it but go by train. We taxied back here through that abominable storm, booked for Boston by the eleven ten, and ducked across the way to dine at the Biltmore. No good going home, of course, with the servants out--and everything. And just as we were finishing dinner this amiable sister of mine gave a whoop and let it out that she'd forgotten her jewels. Well, there was plenty of time. I put her aboard the train as soon as the sleepers were open--ten o'clock, you know--and trotted back home to fetch the loot."
A reminiscent chuckle punctuated his account, but struck no echo from Sally's humour. Moveless and mute, the girl sat unconsciously clutching the edge of the table as if it were the one stable fact in her whirling world; all her bravado dissipating as her daze of wonder yielded successively to doubt, suspicion, consternation.
"I said there was plenty of time, and so there was, barring accidents. But the same wouldn't be barred. I manufactured the first delay for myself, forgetting to ask Adele for the combination. I knew where to find it, in a little book locked up in the desk; but I hadn't a key to the desk, so felt obliged to break it open, and managed that so famously I was beginning to fancy myself a bit as a Raffles when, all of a sudden--Pow!" he laughed--"that fat devil landed on my devoted neck with all the force and fury of two hundredweight of professional jealousy!
"And then," he added, "in you walked from God knows where--"
His eyes affixed a point of interrogation to the simple declarative.
She started nervously in response, divided between impulses which she had no longer sufficient wit to weigh. Should she confess, or try to lie out of it?
Must she believe this glibly simple and adequate account or reject it on grounds of pardonable skepticism?
If this man were what he professed to be, surely he must recognise her borrowed plumage as his sister's property. True, that did not of necessity follow; men have so little understanding of women's clothing; it pleases them or it displeases, if thrust upon their attention, but once withdrawn it is forgotten utterly. Such might well be the case in this present instance; the man gave Sally, indeed, every reason to believe him as much bewildered and mystified by her as she was by him.
On the other hand, and even so …
The infatuate impulse prevailed, to confess and take the consequences.
"I'm afraid--" she began in a quaver.
"No need to be--none I know of, at least," he volunteered promptly, if without moderating his exacting stare.
"You don't understand--"
She hesitated, sighed, plunged in desperation. "It's no use; there's nothing for me to do but own up. What you were not to-night, Mr. Savage, I was."
"Sounds like a riddle to me. What is the answer?"
"You were just make-believe. I was the real thing--a real thief. No, let me go on; it's easier if you don't interrupt. Yes, I'll tell you my name, but it won't mean anything. I'm nobody. I'm Sarah Manvers. I'm a shop-girl out of work."
"Still I don't see … "
"I'm coming to that. I live on your block--the Lexington Avenue end, of course--with two other girls. And this afternoon--the studio was so hot and stuffy and lonesome, with both my friends away--I went up on the roof for better air, and fell asleep there and got caught by the storm. Somebody had closed the scuttle, and I ran across roofs looking for another that wasn't fastened down, and when I found one--it was your house--I was so frightened by the lightning I hardly knew what I was doing. I just tumbled in--"
"And welcome, I'm sure," Blue Serge interpolated.
She blundered on, unheeding: "I went all through the house, but there wasn't anybody, and--I was so wet and miserable that I--made myself at home--decided to take a bath and--and borrow some things to wear until my own were dry. And then I thought … "
She halted, confused, realising how impossible it would be to convince anybody with the tale of her intention merely to borrow the clothing for a single night of arabesque adventure, finding it difficult now to believe in on her own part, and hurried breathlessly on to cover the hiatus.
"And then I heard a noise on the roof. I had closed the scuttle, but I was frightened. And I crept down-stairs and--saw the light in the library and … That's all." And when he didn't reply promptly, she added with a trace of challenge: "So now you know!"
He started as from deep reverie.
"But why call yourself a thief--for that?"
"Because … because … " Overstrung nerves betrayed her in gusty confession. "Because it's no good blinking facts: that's what I was in my heart of hearts. Oh, it's all very well for you to be generous, and for me to pretend I meant only to borrow, and--and all that! But the truth is, I did steal--and I never honestly meant to send the things back. At first--yes; then I meant to return them, but never once they were on my back. I told myself I did, I believed I did; but deep down, all along, I didn't, I didn't, I didn't! I'm a liar as well as a thief."
"Oh, come now!" Blue Serge interjected in a tone of mild remonstrance, lounging back and eying the girl intently. "Don't be so down on yourself."
"Well, everything I've said was true except that one word 'borrow'; but that in itself was a lie big enough to eclipse every word of truth. … But you'll never understand--never! Men can't. They simply can't know what it is to be clothes-hungry--starving for something fit to wear--as I have been for years and years and years, as most of us in the shops are all our lives long."
"Perhaps I understand, though," he argued with an odd look. "I know what you mean, at any rate, even if I'm not ready to admit that shop-girls are the only people who ever know what it is to desire the unattainable. Other people want things, at times, just as hard as you do clothes."
"Well, but … " She stammered, unable to refute this reasonable contention, but, womanlike, persistent to try: "It's different--when you've never had anything. Try to think what it must be to work from eight till six--sometimes later--six days a week, for just enough to keep alive on, if you call such an existence being alive! Why, in ten years I haven't seen the country or the sea--unless you count trips to Coney on crowded trolley-cars, and mighty few of them. I never could afford a vacation, though I've been idle often enough--never earned more than ten dollars a week, and that not for many weeks together. I've lived on as little as five--on as little as charity, on nothing but the goodness of my friends at times. That's why, when I saw myself prettily dressed for once, and thought nothing could stop my getting away, I couldn't resist the temptation. I didn't know where I was going, dressed like this, and not a cent; but I was going some place, and I wasn't ever coming back!"
"Good Lord!" the man said gently. "Who'd blame you?"
"Don't sympathise with me," she protested, humanly quite unconscious of her inconsistency. "I don't deserve it. I'm caught with the goods on, literally, figuratively, and I've got to pay the penalty. Oh, I don't mean what you mean. I'm no such idiot as to think you'll have me sent to jail; you've been too kind already and--and, after all, I did do you a considerable service, I did help you out of a pretty dangerous fix. But the penalty I'll pay is worse than jail: it's giving up these pretty things and all my silly, sinful dreams, and going back to that scrubby studio--and no job--"